By: James Fegan
Standing at center court of the Genesis Convention Center before the tip-off of a high school boys’ basketball game between hometown Gary Roosevelt and Indianapolis’ Crispus Attucks, Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson made the best offer at summing up the special purpose of the sixth annual CN Lakeshore Classic. “We are here to say that history matters,” Freeman-Wilson said.
The game was a rematch of a state championship title game; a title game held 58 years ago, where a Gary Roosevelt team featuring future New York Knicks great Dr. Dick Barnett lost to a Crispus Attucks team that suited up a junior forward of some regard, who went by the name of Oscar Robertson.
The glory of a state title was sweet for a 17-year-old Robertson, but the game carried a heavier meaning, something that still shines out on the resume of a man on the short list of the greatest basketball players of all-time. Before the 1955 Indiana state championship game, no two predominantly black teams had played for a state title anywhere in the country, in any sport.
“At the time it happened, I was 17-years-old. It was a competitive game and I wanted to win,” Robertson said Saturday, “When I got older it meant a lot more then, because I thought about the game and what it meant.”
On Saturday, this year’s Gary Roosevelt team fell to Crispus Attucks again, 75-54, but not before the pregame ceremony at half-court. Each team posed for pictures and showered plaques and trophies upon the men who cleared the way in front of them, or as the tagline for the weekend read: (the men who) played “the game that changed basketball.”
Robertson, known for his eye-popping production in the NBA and his dogged pursuit of players’ rights, sat alongside his high school teammates from Crispus Attucks as they were honored for being the first predominantly black school that could call themselves champions. But the hometown cheers rained down upon the six surviving members of Gary Roosevelt. 58 years after their crowning achievement, Dick Barnett and William Eisen—who won Mr. Basketball for the state of Indiana that year over both Barnett and Robertson—had their jersey numbers retired and presented to them.
For Barnett, whose jersey number has already been retired by the New York Knicks and Tennessee State University, the honor inspired him to look back on the whole of his life’s accomplishments. As a result, he spent the weekend speaking of dreams realized. Barnet told stories of how he skipped his senior prom to practice his game, and how a ruptured Achilles injury suffered with the Knicks pushed him to pursue his education. Barnett declared that even with its imperfections, “America is a place where dreams really do come true.”
The celebratory tone of the weekend belied the cold realities of segregation that hung over the championship game being commemorated.
During Friday’s luncheon, held at the convention center that kicked off the weekend’s festivities, Robertson recalled how his team was excluded from the tradition of participating teams staying in the Butler University Field House during the state tournament finals, and how the segregation he experienced was so complete that he was unaware of the privileges he was denied.
“I’m glad I went to an all-black school,” Robertson said, “I didn’t have one teacher who disliked me because of the color of my skin. I had a great social time, and I don’t think I would have had that at a white school. I went to a white college and I didn’t have that.”
In contrast, Robertson, Barnett and their nine surviving teammates were paraded across Gary as the guests of honor in a manner that was denied to them when they were playing their way into history. At the Friday luncheon, at the meet-and-greet at the Majestic Star Casino later that night, and all the way up until the Saturday tip-off of this year’s matchup between Gary Roosevelt and Crispus Attucks, they were mobbed and greeted as conquering heroes; the boys who forced open segregation’s doors and returned home as men to celebrate.
It was not a round number anniversary of the game, or a return to the title game for Gary Roosevelt and Crispus Attucks that spurred Chamber of Commerce President Chuck Hughes to coordinate a reunion. It was just time to remember.